Saturday, November 10, 2012

In the large American cities that lack a robust public
transportation system—which is most of them—we justifiably celebrate every
minor victory toward shifting development away from auto-centrism. Mid-sized cities in the Midwest and
South seem to be among the most susceptible: most of them have a “Midtown”
district that predates the automobile.
If it is already on the affluent side of town, this district probably
hosts some of the city’s best historic architecture, all remnants from the time
when it was a fashionable commercial hub.
At this same time, the aforementioned architecture in these Midtowns has
struggled from a period of neglect and perceived obsolescence during the peak
of decentralization to more auto-oriented suburbs.

These days, many Midtowns are patchy at best, with parking
lots interspersed to serve the surviving old buildings, juxtaposed with some
more recently constructed retail structures that serve both the neighborhoods’
residents, as well as commuters zooming down these streets on their way to the
fashionable suburbs several miles out where they live. Those new structures don’t fit in, not
only because they eschew high-quality brick or limestone materials, but because
they are often identical to the same structures those commuters would find in
the hinterlands where they live: drive-through fast-food restaurants, drug
stores, or automotive service centers.
There’s nothing wrong having them in urban settings: at the peak of
decentralization, city leaders were no doubt happy to have investors in their
struggling Midtowns and welcomed the construction, regardless of how
incompatible it was with the older neighborhood buildings. After all, transportation in private
vehicles were the way of things, and these old districts had to adapt.

But, more often than not, the Midtowns also boast
classically walkable street grids, high-quality older housing, and mature tree
canopies. They are sometimes a
quick bus ride or even bicycle ride from downtown. And they are hip again. As a new generation of urban admirers has begun to rebel
against the still-dominant suburban archetype, many advocates have tried
straddling between the ideological extremes of either blocking all incompatible
infill development or permitting anything and everything for the sake of
bolstering the tax base. The
result of this push-and-pull manifests itself in a variation of a classic old
form: the pseudo-urban infill, like this Chick-fil-A in Birmingham, Alabama from
the photo below.

It sits at a prominent intersection in the city’s Five
Points South neighborhood, about a mile from downtown and one of the more
popular destinations in the metro for pedestrian-oriented nightlife. Just a block from the Chick-fil-A is the
heart of the neighborhood, characterized by its unusual intersection and the
wonderfully surreal Storyteller Fountain.

What distinguishes the Chick-fil-A in this first photograph
from the freestanding buildings in the suburbs? The biggest feature I can detect is the placement of the
building in relation to the parcel: it more or less stands flush with the
property line. (I say “more or
less” because there does appear to a bit of gap between the building and the
sidewalk, presumably reserved for outdoor seating or bicycle parking.) A pedestrian can approach the
building’s entrance directly from the sidewalk, without having to walk in the
path of a vehicle.

In addition, looking at the side of the building, it does
not appear to offer a drive-thru window.

Instead, this Chick-fil-A features a parking lot that abuts a
sleek “arcade” along a widened, landscaped sidewalk, exactly where a drive-thru
lane would normally cut across in join with the street. These two modifications might seem
modest, but the site plan for this storefront would contrast significantly with
the typical suburban configuration, which would include multiple rows of
off-street parking in front of the structure, thereby forcing the building far
from the street.

It might not seem like a dramatic gesture, but, barring the
necessary zoning regulations, it is extremely difficult to effect this sort of
change in typology for a typically suburban, automobile-oriented
establishment. And Birmingham does
not have the regulations in place, at least not here at Five Points South. A review of the city’s Zoning Ordinance
and Zoning Map
places this part of town in the B-3 Community Business District zone. Buildings within the district have no
true minimum front, side, or rear yard regulations, meaning that setbacks are
not required—unless a parcel sits next a lot in a different zoning district
that regulates dwellings, a building in B-3 can bump up right against the lot
line. Meanwhile, the rules in Zone
B-3 for commercial parking lots require one space for each 200 square feet of
floor area (Section 5-1, item 19, but halved because of the standards of
B-3). The City of Birmingham’s
zoning ordinance allows for an urban
structure to be built with zero setbacks, but it doesn’t require it; the regulations have set the minimum yard sizes at
“none”, but they have not set a maximum.
The regs also have a minimum required number of parking spaces that is
less strict that most other regions in the city, but it has no maximum space
requirement. So any developer who
chooses to build here has the option to build a structure with relatively high
lot coverage without seeking a variance to the rules, but he or she could just
as easily build a quintessential suburban building as well.

I confidently suspected, back when I took these photos, that
this Chick-fil-A adapted to this configuration only after significant wrangling
with the City. In light of these
standards, it turns out I was right: the City’s Design Review Committee rejected some of Chick-fil-A’s initial proposals for the site back in 2010. Why did the Committee reject them? Because Chik-fil-A wanted to insert its
suburban design typology smack in one of Birmingham’s most economically healthy
urban neighborhoods, complete with a drive-thru in an area thick with both vehicular
and pedestrian traffic. Chick-fil-A’s
initial design submission met zoning standards; the company’s team did nothing
wrong. But a combination of the
Design Review Committee and concerned members of the Five Points South
neighborhood fought the drive-thru option, claiming it would induce more
traffic and—most importantly—was not “in keeping with the character of Five
Points South.” The Committee and
Five Points South Association risked scaring off Chick-fil-A altogether as an
investor in the neighborhood, but they weighed their risks and decided it was
more important not to sacrifice the walkability of the area, especially since
this new restaurant was replacing an equally suburban-minded predecessor: a
shuttered Ruby Tuesday that also did an adequate job of respecting the urban
character at the intersection, as indicated in a Google Streetview from June 2008. After some further revisions,
Chick-fil-A agreed to build at the corner without a drive-thru.

And so it goes.
In most medium sized cities with weak mass transit, the national chains
must face higher neighborhood and City-led scrutiny before they can plop their
suburban buildings in a Midtown that is valiantly trying to recover from
decades of decentralization and disinvestment. Sometimes the zoning regulations are strict enough to
prohibit building under anything but a supremely urban configuration, with
minimum off-street parking, no drive-thrus, and zero setbacks. However, out of fear of repelling
virtually all potential investors, few cities yet enforce such draconian standards. If a Walgreens or CVS or McDonald’s or
Jack-in-the-Box thinks a certain urban setting is lucrative enough, it will
probably jump through the hoops that the City throws at it, just as Chick-fil-A
apparently did. The result
generally appears to be a win-win: a previously vacant (and potentially
blighted) parcel gets filled with a reliable national retailer, and the
surrounding community is content with the final appearance.

But there’s always a clincher. Take a look at that one side of the Chick-fil-A—the side
opposite the street intersection:

It’s still an awfully big parking lot for an average-sized
restaurant. Without counting the
spaces (and without knowing the exact square footage of the building), I’d
venture to say this Chick-fil-A has well more than the minimum of one parking
space for every 200 square feet in the building’s floorplate. It’s a suburban-sized parking lot. And, even though the building is
virtually flush with the parcel’s edges, it’s hardly dense in comparison to the
environment around it: it’s still a squat one-story structure with a single
use. So, after all the
negotiations between the City, the neighborhood, Chick-fil-A, and who knows what
other parties, the result is still a one-story structure on a prime intersection,
lacking any mixture of uses. Not
terribly urban, and certainly not in keeping with the type of buildings that
Five Points South would have supported during its initial heyday back in the
1920s.

And so it goes…yet again. Most of these Midtowns get buildings like this—urbanism with
the bar set incredibly low. It’s
still better than a drive-thru fast food that sits smack in the middle of a sea
of parking lots. But—it seems
ironic now—this is my second article in a row for which the phrase “Pyrrhic
victory” seems appropriate. One of
Birmingham’s most attractive neighborhoods received this mediocre building in
2011, when it is possible that, given the likelihood that the neighborhood’s
attractiveness will only increase in the future, it could have fought for a two
or even a multi-story building at some point down the road, when land values
are high enough that developers can’t justify such a big parking lot, or such
low FAR (Floor-Area Ratio), or the zoning regulations insist on a high-density
structure rather than simply permit it.

Obviously, I’m not faulting the City of Birmingham, or any
other party, for that matter. No
one can gamble on the future when we reflect upon the vast array of interweaving
temporal and spatial evolutions our cities have experienced in their relatively
short lives. Who would have
perceived in 1950 that Atlanta would end up five times the size of
Birmingham? Back then, they were
about the same size. If one can
imagine that Birmingham may someday surge into the stratosphere the way Atlanta
did, this modest Chick-fil-A is a mere “bookmark” for the high density mixed-use
building that will eventually replace it.
And, as placeholders go, a slightly modified suburban prototype is still
better than a vacant building, or a massive parking lot. My guess is that, in the intervening
years, other national chains will stake their claim to vacant lots in Five
Points South, and the negotiations will continue but under increasingly
stricter design parameters with each iteration. Eventually this bureaucratic routine might even encourage
Chick-fil-A to partner with residential or office developers for a collaborative
design process in urban settings.
Until then, Midtown Birmingham gets a new restaurant, and the commuters
who shun it for its lack of a drive-thru still have plenty of other options—out
in the burbs where they live.

About Me

This blog concerns itself with the foundation of American dirt, regardless of where I claim to “live” at that moment. It is the playing field and landscape upon which all living participants tend to their own aspirations, leaving non-indigenous built forms which my aging digital camera hopes to capture.